1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and, more particularly, to selectively locking GUI controls to prevent accidental operations in a computing environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
The most commonly used interfaces on computing devices are those provided by the operating system. An operating system (OS) is the software that manages the sharing of the resources of a computer. Most operating systems come with an application that provides a user interface for managing the OS, such as a command line interpreter or graphical user interface (GUI). Most GUI OS's have a multitasking capability, in which multiple tasks share common processing resources, such as a central processing unit (CPU). Different windows in a GUI can be simultaneously present in a multitasking GUI OS.
There are many common GUI elements that most operating systems share. For example, it's common for content displayed in dialog boxes referred to as “windows.” It's also common for these windows to contain a title bar at its top displaying the title of the window. Another common element is containing three controls, or action buttons, on the title bar. These common controls are close, minimize, and maximize/restore. The close control commonly sends a message to the window to close the window and terminate its process. The minimize control can allow the window to be minimized and moved off-screen onto another common GUI element to switch between running applications. When the maximize/restore button is in the maximize state, it can allow the window to be resized to fill the contents of the screen. At this point, the button commonly changes to its restore state, which can allow the window to be resized to not fill the entire screen.
There are certain situations when using a computing device that can result in accidental presses on the wrong dialog control. FIG. 1 (Prior Art) shows a system 100 of a situation that can cause an accidental press on the wrong dialog control. In system 100, desktop environment 105 can be an interface running on a computing device. Desktop environment 105 can have two open windows, bottom application 110 and topmost application 115. In the situation of system 100, the window controls 112 of bottom application 110 are overlapped by window controls 118 of topmost application 115. In such situations, a user may attempt to click on a close control in window controls 112 of bottom application 110, but miss and click the close control in window controls 118 of topmost application 115. In this case, the user can lose the current work in the window they accidentally closed. A frequency with which windows are closed makes it cumbersome to prompt a user to confirm closing every window. Currently, there are no intuitive ways to prevent the accidental close operation other than imposing a draconian confirmation prompt before every close action. What is needed is a user selectable mechanism to assign additional protections on a control-by-control basis.